Things I Learned Today: Asteroid Mining is a Go
The U.S. Congress passed a bill this week that would, as one of it’s provisions, allow privatized mining of asteroids.
While this is one step toward realizing a universe with Weyland-Yutani, in a more immediate and less prosaic future, it does pose something of a question about what this means to the global-soon-to-be-universal community. Can one country on this planet enact laws that give rights to something in space, austensibly resources whose use would effect everyone?
How do we deal with the legalities of what might happen in space-rock homesteads? Who has the right to write the laws to keep the potential industrial astronauts and the companies that sponsor them safe, healthy and, for all intents and purposes, free? This seems to me to be something better solved on a global scale. Like fishing in international waters.
What do you think? Will this be a new gold rush to a colder Yukon? Or will this be the start of a whole new series of international laws to keep space... open?